Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics – serie

Adding a new introduction and two previously unpublished papers, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis brings together Van Leeuwen's methodological work on discourse analysis of the last 15 years. Discourse, Van Leeuwen argues, is a resource for representation, a knowledge about some aspect of reality which can be drawn upon when that aspect of reality has to be represented, a framework for making sense of things. And they are plural. There can be different discourses, different ways of making sense of the same aspect of reality that serve different interests and will therefore be used in different social contexts. However abstract some discourses are, discourses ultimately always represent doings, Van Leeuwen argues. Doing is the foundation of knowing, and social practices are the foundation of discourses. Studying children's books, newspaper reports, brochures and other texts, as well as photographs and children's toys, Van Leeuwen investigates what can happen when practices are transformed into discourses and provides analytical tools for reconstructing discourses from texts. Throughout the book, Van Leeuwen makes connections between sociological and linguistic or semiotic concepts and methods to ensure the social and critical relevance of his analytical categories. Van Leeuwen's work has already been widely used by critical discourse analysts across the world. This volume will be a welcome guide for anyone looking for a form of discourse analysis that is both explicit and methodical, and critically incisive.

Though most recognize the term Aryan, few understand its extensive and complex history. Scholars continue to debate the location of the original Aryan homeland, but unlike with the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome, there is no direct textual or archeological evidence of an ancient Aryan civilization. As Christopher M. Hutton argues in this book, Aryan, in essence, is a fictional category--the Frankenstein's monster of the western intellectual tradition.In The People That Never Were, Hutton takes a fresh look at the concept and asserts that much of the received wisdom is misleading or false. He begins by challenging the belief in the existence of an ancient Aryan race or people, making the case that the concept was brought into being by western philology and Indology. Hutton then takes the reader through the history of the Aryan concept, beginning with colonial scholarship in India around 1800, and ending in the first decades of the twentieth century. With a particular focus on the role of philologists' distorted readings of ancient Sanskrit texts, Hutton shows how Aryan came into English around 1840, promoted primarily by F. Max Müller, whose own conceptual confusions subsequently were projected back onto ancient India and at the same time read into contemporary Europe. As a result, Aryan emerged as a free-standing explanatory device and a key to historical narratives of superiority and inferiority, leading to bitter controversies and profound misunderstandings that continue to this day.A critical intellectual resource on the Aryan paradigm, The People That Never Were interrogates the conceptual errors that provide the basis for historical linguistics, raising a challenging set of questions for the discipline. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

When talk circulates through technological media - through television or radio and through the activities they support, like the dissemination of news, product advertising or entertainment - it takes on distinctive characteristics, functions and styles. The talking media have developed their own ways of styling individuals (often as celebrities of different types, but also as 'ordinary people'), and ways of styling relationships (such as constructing informality or trust or authority). Media also style their own ways of communicating (how to read the news, how to conduct interviews, how to entertain or educate others, and so on). Media invest heavily in style and styling, drawing on semiotic modes well beyond speech itself. 'Style' therefore needs to be theorised carefully in sociolinguistics and neighbouring disciplines. Episodes and fragments of mediated styles commonly take on new lives when they are re-circulated via interactive 'new' media platforms. Style therefore points to both stability, where ways of speaking and ways of being have become culturally familiar, and to instability, in the talking media's persistent dynamic reworking of stylistic norms. This book explores a wide range of normative structures and creative media processes of this sort, in many different national contexts and in different languages. The globalised world is already massively mediatised - what we know about language, people and society is necessarily shaped through our engagement with media. But talking media are caught up in wider currents of rapid change too. Creative innovations in media styling can heighten our reflexive awareness, but they can also unsettle our existing understandings of language-society relations. In reporting new investigations by expert researchers, situated in relation to relevant theory, the book gives an original and timely account of how style, media and change need to be integrated further to advance the discipline of sociolinguistics.

When talk circulates through technological media - through television or radio and through the activities they support, like the dissemination of news, product advertising or entertainment - it takes on distinctive characteristics, functions and styles. The talking media have developed their own ways of styling individuals (often as celebrities of different types, but also as 'ordinary people'), and ways of styling relationships (such as constructing informality or trust or authority). Media also style their own ways of communicating (how to read the news, how to conduct interviews, how to entertain or educate others, and so on). Media invest heavily in style and styling, drawing on semiotic modes well beyond speech itself. 'Style' therefore needs to be theorised carefully in sociolinguistics and neighbouring disciplines. Episodes and fragments of mediated styles commonly take on new lives when they are re-circulated via interactive 'new' media platforms. Style therefore points to both stability, where ways of speaking and ways of being have become culturally familiar, and to instability, in the talking media's persistent dynamic reworking of stylistic norms. This book explores a wide range of normative structures and creative media processes of this sort, in many different national contexts and in different languages. The globalised world is already massively mediatised - what we know about language, people and society is necessarily shaped through our engagement with media. But talking media are caught up in wider currents of rapid change too. Creative innovations in media styling can heighten our reflexive awareness, but they can also unsettle our existing understandings of language-society relations. In reporting new investigations by expert researchers, situated in relation to relevant theory, the book gives an original and timely account of how style, media and change need to be integrated further to advance the discipline of sociolinguistics.

In Pursuit of English traces how the English language became an object of heated pursuit amid South Korea's rapid neoliberalization, creating the so-called "English fever" of the 1990s and 2000s. Joseph Sung-Yul Park demonstrates that English gained prominence not because of the language's supposed economic value, but because of the anxieties, insecurities, and moral desire instilled by neoliberal Korean society. Park shows how English came to be seen as an index of an ideal neoliberal subject who willingly engages in constant self-management and self-development in response to the changing conditions of the global economy. Bringing together ethnographically-oriented perspectives on subjectivity, critical analysis of conditions of contemporary capitalism, theories of neoliberal governmentality, and sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological frameworks of metapragmatic analysis, In Pursuit of English develops an innovative new direction for research at the intersection language and political economy, challenging researchers to consider subjectivity as the key for understanding the place of language in neoliberalism.

To do ethnography, a researcher must have rapport with research subjects. But what is rapport? Ethnography and ethnographic methods have increasingly become a feature of social inquiry in general and sociolinguistics in particular, and rapport is generally considered a prerequisite for fieldwork. And yet, unlike related terms such as "communication" and "phatic communion," this concept has remained largely unexamined.Reimagining Rapport turns a critical eye to the use of the term "rapport" across disciplines. The collection analyzes the very idea of rapport, both exploring how it has been shaped by historical forces and actors within sociocultural anthropology, and questioning its usefulness. Rather than viewing the term as simply denoting a type of positive social relationship that needs to be formed between researcher and consultant before research can begin, this book invites us to reimagine rapport theoretically, methodologically, and meta-methodologically. Zane Goebel and other leading sociolinguists challenge readers to think about how rapport has been constructed within these disciplines, and ultimately to see rapport as an emergent, co-constructed social relationship that is actively built during situated multimodal encounters. The contributors collectively examine the role of ideology and mediation in the construction of rapport, and argue that reconceptualizing research-subject relationships is essential for establishing more sophisticated ways of understanding, interpreting, and representing research context.A valuable resource for scholars and students of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology—as well as for others engaged in ethnographic fieldwork—Reimagining Rapport is the first collection to provide an in-depth investigation of this critically important but previously unexamined concept.

Based on analysis of two psychiatric interviews, this book investigates ways of establishing coherence in the discourse of a thought-disordered patient. In the first interview, the patient is diagnosed as being in an acute psychotic state. In the second, the same patient is considered to be fully recovered and ready to be discharged from hospital. Ribeiro concludes that psychotic discourse, while incoherent on the level of topic, is coherent on another - that of frame. Hence both topic and frame analysis contribute to an understanding of psychotic discourse and of the contexts of talk where discourse emerges.

This fascinating study explores the ways of establishing coherence in the discourse of a thought-disordered patient. Ribeiro analyses the discourse between a doctor and a patient who is under an acute psychotic crisis, and then later, when the patient is deemed recovered. Ribeiro looks at how the participants jointly establish referential meaning, and how topic coherence is achieved or breaks down. She then considers how the participants convey superordinate messages, metamessages, and how the patient signals and assesses the frame of talk. Ribeiro concludes that psychotic discourse, while incoherent on the level of topic, may be coherent on another level--that of frame. Using sociolinguistic discourse analysis, conversational analysis, and frame analysis, with a dose of theory from contemporary cognitive psychology, Ribeiro's book demonstrates the importance of contextualization in interaction.

The author of the bestselling You Just Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen has collected twelve papers about gender-related patterns in conversational interaction. The theoretical thrust of the collection, like that of Tannen's own work, is anthropological and sociolinguistic: female and male styles are approached as different "cultural" practice. Beginning with Tannen's own essay arguing for the relativity of discourse strategies, the volume challenges facile generalizations about gender-based styles and explores the complex relationship between gender and language use. The chapters, some previously unpublished and some classics in the field, address discourse across the lifespan, including preschool, junior high school, and adult interaction. They explore such varied discourse contexts as preschool disputes, romantic and sexual teasing among adolescent girls, cooperative competition in adolescent "girl talk," conversational storytelling, a faculty committee meeting, children in an urban black neighborhood at play, and a legal dispute in a Tenejapan village in Mexico. Two chapters review and evaluate the literature on key areas of gender-related linguistic phenomena: interruption and amount of talk. Gender and Conversational Interaction will interest general readers as well as students and scholars in a variety of disciplines including linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, women's studies, and communications.

Most people know that therapists listen to people discuss their problems, and that they are paid for their services. Yet few people who have not undergone therapy know what actually goes on in these sessions, or have any idea about how talking to a stranger can be beneficial to one's mental health. What is therapeutic about therapeutic discourse? Why is the therapy hour such a powerful influence in peoples' lives if all they do is talk? Who talks, and what about?To answer some of these questions from a linguistic stand-point, Kathleen Ferrara analyses samples of psychotherapeutic discourse between several therapists and their clients. She focuses on cohesion and the joint construction of digalogue to get at her main concern of just how talk can be therapeutic, and at the same time addresses recent concerns in the study of conversation. Her thesis is that repetition and continuity are resources of language which speakers can recombine in various ways to create meaning within a given social context, and she looks at the many ways these cohesive devices are used in therapy speech.Therapeutic Ways with Words should appeal not only to linguists and people concerned with language in the professions, but to the large audience connected to psychotherapy.'The scholarship reflected in the manuscript is not just sound, but creative; not just up-to-date, but up to the minute. Ferrara offers insightful treatments of data just begging for attention in light of recent developments in discourse analysis, and thus contributes cutting-edge results ... It represents the kind of research we need much more of in linguistics today." Neal Norrick, Professor of English-Linguistics, Northern Illinois University

Most people know that therapists listen to people discuss their problems, and that they are paid for their services. Yet few people who have not undergone therapy know what actually goes on in these sessions, or have any idea about how talking to a stranger can be beneficial to one's mental health. What is therapeutic about therapeutic discourse? Why is the therapy hour such a powerful influence in peoples' lives if all they do is talk? Who talks, and what about?To answer some of these questions from a linguistic stand-point, Kathleen Ferrara analyses samples of psychotherapeutic discourse between several therapists and their clients. She focuses on cohesion and the joint construction of digalogue to get at her main concern of just how talk can be therapeutic, and at the same time addresses recent concerns in the study of conversation. Her thesis is that repetition and continuity are resources of language which speakers can recombine in various ways to create meaning within a given social context, and she looks at the many ways these cohesive devices are used in therapy speech.Therapeutic Ways with Words should appeal not only to linguists and people concerned with language in the professions, but to the large audience connected to psychotherapy.'The scholarship reflected in the manuscript is not just sound, but creative; not just up-to-date, but up to the minute. Ferrara offers insightful treatments of data just begging for attention in light of recent developments in discourse analysis, and thus contributes cutting-edge results ... It represents the kind of research we need much more of in linguistics today." Neal Norrick, Professor of English-Linguistics, Northern Illinois University

The guiding idea of this collection is to bring together a number of different perspectives on variation in language according to occasion of use. At present this is a rather ill-defined field of interest sometimes referred to as style variation and sometimes as register variation. This area has not figured as prominently in sociolinguistics as certain and other aspects of variation (social dialect variation in particular). This volume draws attention to the importance of this ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon and points the way to a unified approach. Biber and Finegan have solicited studies presenting a variety of perspectives on registers and register variation, as well as papers that attempt to integrate register and social dialect variation into a coherent theoretical framework.

This is a collection of the most influential and important work of the distinguished sociolinguist Charles A. Ferguson, ranging from studies of baby talk across cultures to analyses of the impact of literacy and religion on cultures across the world.

This is a collection of the most influential and important work of the distinguished sociolinguist Charles A. Ferguson, ranging from studies of baby talk across cultures to analyses of the impact of literacy and religion on cultures across the world.

Although there is rising interest in medical discourse, there has not until now been a detailed analysis of doctor-patient interaction in a private practice setting. Nancy Ainsworth-Vaughn has been able to tape both male and female doctors in such a setting. On the basis of these interviews, she demonstrates that not just the doctor (as suggested in the previous literature) but patients as well wield considerable influence by actively employing verbal strategies to construct different types of power in medical discourse.

Although there is rising interest in medical discourse, there has not until now been a detailed analysis of doctor-patient interaction in a private practice setting. Nancy Ainsworth-Vaughn has been able to tape both male and female doctors in such a setting. On the basis of these interviews, she demonstrates that not just the doctor (as suggested in the previous literature) but patients as well wield considerable influence by actively employing verbal strategies to construct different types of power in medical discourse.

This is the first collection of scholarship devoted to the language of older children and adolescents. It offers a cross-disciplinary perspective, with contributors from sociolinguistics, anthropology, and sociology, using a variety of analytic approaches. The chapters examine skillful and varied ways in which young people of different ages, classes, and ethnicities construct their world through language.

Linguists who have studied simplified varieties of a given language, such as pidgins or the language of care-givers, have tended to explain similarities in their structure by the fact that they use the same mechanisms of simplification. Bruthiaux tests this idea by looking at the structure of classified ads in American English, using a body of 800 ads from four categories: automobile sales, apartments for rent, help wanted, and personal ads. Bruthiaux's thesis is that strict, uniform constraints on space should result in uniformly simple texts, no matter which category they are in, and that any variation would be due to the particular needs of each category. To prove this he describes the linguistic structure of classified ads, and shows that they are characterized by a minimal degree of morphosyntactic elaboration. He then examines aspects of their conventions to highlight the role of pre-patterned and prefabricated segments whose collocational rigidity may force the inclusion of otherwise dispensable items. He finds that there is indeed significant variation across ad categories in terms of morphosyntactic elaboration, and concludes that this is due to a greater or lesser need to be explicit, as well as a greater or lesser anticipation of interaction. Finally, he examines the implications of these findings for the study of linguistic simplification and register variation.

Linguists usually discuss language or dialects in terms of groups of speakers. Believing that patterns can be seen more clearly in the group than the individual, researchers often present group scores with no indication of the variation within the group. Even though they all acknowledge that no two individuals speak alike, few study individual variation and voice. The individual has always been thought to be outside the purview of linguistic theory. Johnstone makes the case for the importance of the role of the individual, and the individual's idiosyncrasies, in language and linguistics. Using theoretical arguments and discourse analysis, along with linguistic examples from a wide variety of speakers and settings, Johnstone illustrates how speakers draw on linguistic models associated with class, ethnicity, gender, region, among others, to construct individual ways of sounding. In doing so,she shows that certain important questions in sociolinguistics and pragmatics can only be fully answered with reference to individual speakers. Her study is important not only for the understanding of speech as expressive of self,but for the study of of variation and the mechanisms of linguistic choice and change.

Queerly Phrased is a groundbreaking collection of previously unpublished essays that examine the relationship between language and the construction of gender and sexuality. Bridging the gap between sociolinguistics and gay studies, the contributors draw on traditional models of language analysis as well as recent developments in gender theory to show how language plays a crucial role in the creation of culture and its representation.

Queerly Phrased is a groundbreaking collection of previously unpublished essays that examine the relationship between language and the construction of gender and sexuality. Bridging the gap between sociolinguistics and gay studies, the contributors draw on traditional models of language anaylsis of well as recent developments in gender theory to show how language plays a crucial role in the creation of culture and its representation.

The authors here promote the reintroduction of temporality into the description and analysis of spoken interaction. They argue that spoken words are, in fact, temporal objects and that unless linguists consider how they are delivered within the context of time, they will not capture the full meaning of situated language use. Their approach is rigorously empirical, with analyses of English, German, and Italian rhythm, all grounded in sequences of actual talk-in-internation.

This book studies interpreting between languages as a discourse process and as about managing ccommunication between two people who do not speak a common language. Roy examines the turn exchanges of a face-to-face interpreted event in order to offer a definition of interpreted events, describe the process of taking turns with an interpreter, and account for the role of the interpreter in terms of the performance in interaction.

This is the first analysis of the very charged and complex conversations that occur between breast cancer patients and their doctors. Robert focuses in particular on their conversations about possible avenues of treatment, and shows them to be, on the one hand, an active and mutual collaboration of information, and on the other, a subtle delineation of the roles of "expert" and "novice." Her work also highlights the balance a doctor must strike between not guaranteeing a cure while promoting one particular treatment option. This work will interest those in the well-established field of doctor-patient interaction as well as sociolinguists and discourse analysts, and those interested in the intersection between talk and institutional roles.

This collection of previously unpublished, cutting-edge research discusses the conversation analysis (CA) approach to understanding language use. CA is the dominant theory for analyzing the social use of language and is concerned with the description of how speakers engage in conversation and other forms of social interaction involving language. Its proponents are not only linguists but sociologists and anthropologists as well. The unifying theme of these chapters is the intersection of practice and form through the construction of turns and sequences.

This innovative work provides the first comprehensive account of general extenders ("or something", "and stuff", "or whatever"). Combining insights from linguistics, cognitive psychology, and interactional sociolinguistics, the author demonstrates that these small phrases are not simply vague expressions, but have a powerful role in making interpersonal communication work. The audience for this book includes linguists, scholars of English, teachers of English as a first and a second language, sociolinguists, psycholinguists, and communications researchers.

Linguists have become increasingly interested in examining how class culture is socially constructed and maintained through spoken language. Julie Lindquist's examination of the linguistic ethnography of a working-class bar in Chicago is an important and original contribution to the field. She examines how regular patrons argue about political issues in order to create a group identity centred around political ideology. She also shows how their political arguments are actually a rhetorical genre, one which creates a delicate balance between group solidarity and individual identity, as well as a tenuous and ambivalent sense of class identity. Using a comination of sociolinguistic and rhetorical analysis, Lindquist's work offers new insights into the shape and meaning of the sociopolitical identity of the working class, and demonstrates how class can be created at the local, and purely rhetorical, level. Compelling and persuasive, her work will be of interest to scholars and students of sociolinguistics, rhetoric, anthroplogy, and cultural studies interested in the complex dynamics of contemporary culture.

This volume contains previously unpublished articles by the most prominent sociolinguists working in the study of language variation today, which when taken together both highlight this new direction, as well as critique conventional wisdom in this growing and vital field of study. The book is divided into four sections: methodology; place (the role of context); adult speech; and attitudes and ideologies.

The emergence of new English dialects in postcolonial regions has transformed the politics of English in the world and language ecologies in many regions. Why, how, and when did these dialects develop? Why do they have the accents and grammars that we hear? Are the grammars of these dialects completely different due to the influence of local languages, or similar due to natural tendencies in human cognition? In terms of social identity, do these new speakers behave like native speakers of British or American English, or like language learners?Focusing on two prominent cases; English in India and in Singapore; this book examines the social, historical, and cognitive forces that together created and continue to shape these dialects. Differences in the linguistic ecology of the two regions help us to identify the strongest mechanisms of dialect formation under long-term cultural contact. The multi-scale analysis of a range of bilinguals moves beyond a simplistic divide between 'deficit' and 'dialect' views of these speech communities, showing that change proceeds unevenly across the language system and the social group, with feedback loops between social history, language learning, language structure, and identity.